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Tuesday, 12 July 2011

MobileRSS for Mac review

Here I am again this time to review the brand new MobileRSS for Mac by NibiruTech, a new RSS reader from the same guys of MobileRSS for iPhone and iPad that I already own.

I am a big fan of Google Reader and I am subscribed to over 40 RSS feeds that I read daily. At work I use the web interface but at home with my Mac I like to use a native program. I have tried many of them in the market but whenever I found out that MobileRSS was coming for Mac, I thought this had to be something good, and it is!

Let me introduce you the new MobileRSS for Mac:

The port from the iPhone/iPad version to the Mac has been done very nicely. We have three panels, one for the RSS feeds, another for the news items and the third for the news content. One feature that I really like it is the option to download full posts, not only the summary from the feed. This displays the news in a very readable way, like if you would use Instapaper for instance.

In the left panel we can choose between the feed list, the home list (with all items, kept unread, starred, shared, etc.) and the people you follow:

In the upper part of the panel you can select if you want to see only the unread items or all the items. The only option missing are the recommended items from Google Reader, but it is not that important after all.

The news items and news content panels can be shown in two different ways: a classical view where all the news items are in a list and with the news content in the right side, and another alternative view really nice that shows the news items as boxes and by clicking on them, the box zooms in and you can read the news content. It is really clever and nice way to "see" the news.

In this pane you have an upper toolbar where you can mark an item as unread, like it, star it, share it and send it to different social services. These services can be configured in the control panel:

There is plenty of services, although Facebook is still missing. I guess this will be added in the next version (or I hope). Sharing with Twitter, for instance, is really easy, shortening the link and with a counter for characters left:

Other options can be accessed in the control panel:

You can actually add more than one Google Reader account. And synching options include the synching interval, 30 min being the minimum time (I would like to see smaller intervals in the next version) as well as option to select from which feeds you want to download the full articles.

As a summary, this is what I like the most:

beautiful user interface and design

social integration (although Facebook is still missing)

options to share, star, mark unread, like in the web interface

great option to load the full article

multiple Google Reader accounts (if use them)

And what I would like to see in next versions:

rss subscription management (add, delete, change folder)

sort by older first (I like to read from oldest to newest)

spacebar to navigate between unread articles and folders like in Google Reader web app

font options (size, type)

load more items automatically when you scroll down to the bottom (now you can load by pressing load more items)

after restarting the app, the panel sizes are not kept if you have resized them

refresh after the computer comes back from sleep

support for trackpad gestures

support for keyboard shortcuts

search functionality

I have to say that this is a very nice first version and I really hope to see improvements coming as they have been also doing in their iPhone and iPad versions.

If you have already made up your mind, go and buy it here in the Mac App Store for just 4.99 USD.